Paper Flowers
by TheLadyIchigo
Summary: An odd dream comes to one Harry Potter. Prologue only ATM.
1. Prologue I: The Dream

**Paper Flowers**

He was having such an odd dream.

He was staring at a painting a portrait of a woman. She sat tall and proud in the frame, moving only slightly as compared to other portraits who walked about. Her skin was pale, her cheekbones high, her eyes green as emerald, her lips red as blood, and her hair as dark as night. He felt an odd feeling of recollection staring at her there.

Then, there was a noise from behind him, so he turned around

He was now standing outside in a garden; silver trees with shimmering leaves grew along the borders of the yard. Flowers of every color and shape imaginable littered the ground in clumps along a stone path with green sparkling gems intertwined. Grass green as emeralds grew everywhere else. Around him the sun was orange and pink, sunset perhaps? He could feel the wind, warm and soft, blowing around him, and smell the flowers, sweeter than candy.

It was so real.

Then there was laughter and he looked up from the ground. Someone was dashing along the path, running towards him. A girl. A little girl, perhaps 3 or 4 no older, with long black hair and sparkling green eyes - her face set in a wide smile as she laughed. She stopped midway down the path, showing off a bouquet of purple flowers, the same shade as her dress, and she smiled. She said something to him, but it was drowned out by the wind that came.

All of a sudden it was gusting, the sky grew dark, and he felt the need to run to her, to protect her. His feet started to move but the wind was faster, wrapping her in a funnel of silver leaves, blocking her form from view. He could hear her calling for someone, for him? He reached for her hand through the wind, but just as their fingertips touched the funnel whisker her away, leaving behind only the bouquet and her lingering scream.

He just stared at it, at the fallen flowers and his own two feet.

A rustling diverted his attention back up. The garden had changed - the trees were no bare, the flowers all dead, the grass gone. The sky was dark and depressing. But she caught his eyes. It was her again the same girl. She stood before him, head down, face covered by her hair.

She looked older now, maybe 2 or 3 years more? Her purple dress had been replaced by a dirty white gown, her feet were bare. The previous immaculate black hair was now stringy. When she at least raised her head to look at him, her eyes looked drained as if all the previous life and happiness had been drained from them.

He reached forward to embrace her to hold her but she pulled away with surprising strength and backed away down the path, shaking her head. Then there was a loud boom like thunder and a blinding flash of white light.

When at last he could see again, he recoiled in horror: the girl lie dead on the path, the white dress stained red - a sword with rubies in the hilt was pierced through her heart from behind. All around him the backdrop broke into shards and fell away into nothingness leaving just him and her dead form in the blackness.

A voice came from all around. The tone sounded familiar, but he couldn't place it.

"It's all for the greater good."

With a startled cry, Harry Potter woke up in his bed in a cold sweat.

AN1- A strange idea that came to me one early morning. Harry would be in his 5th year here. Unsure of whether or not I shall continue it. The title shall be relevant if I continue the story, for now it shall remain a mystery. Leave comments.


	2. Prologue II: Harry in Early Morning

It was such an odd dream.

That one thought dominated Harry's mind as he sat awake, staring at the blurry ceiling through tired eyes. So odd, so very odd. He had had tons of weird dreams before but none of them had been like this, none of them had given him the feeling of horror he felt having seen this dream.

Maybe then it wasn't just a dream? He had visions before, seen though Voldemort's eyes on more than one occasion - perhaps it was another vision? Harry doubted it. When he had had the previous visions, he had always felt what Voldemort had felt - the feelings of joy then hopelessness, sorrow, and horror didn't fit Voldemort's personality at all to Harry. It seemed highly unlikely that the dream had been a vision unwittingly sent to him by Voldemort.

It wasn't a long-forgotten memory either, Harry was positive he had never seen the girl before the dream. Perhaps the future? Harry thought back to a conversation that had occurred at the Gryffindor breakfast table last term at Hogwarts - Lavender had been going on and on about divination and how, if she improved, she might get private lessons with the professor.

"I might even be able to try dream casting!" she had exclaimed loudly.

Neville had been the one to ask what dream casting was - Lavender was all too happy to explain. It was a way of seeing into the future, like making a prophecy only it happened during sleep. Since it occurred when the witch or wizard was asleep, it was a more common type of prediction, since the mind is more relaxed during sleep. Harry hadn't given it much thought at the time.

But now, he wondered if he had been dream casting. He had succeeded slightly at the end of his 3rd year at divination when he had seen Buckbeak in the crystal ball flying away unharmed. Perhaps he really had had a dream cast?

Even so, there was little Harry could do. The location had been rather generic - a garden with some odd trees (no doubt magical); it wasn't like there was a sign or anything distinctive there. The girl's description wouldn't help much either - black hair and green eyes weren't so rare ad Harry wasn't even sure he could pin her age down.

Besides, what if it had been just a dream? If he caused this huge fuss, made the Headmaster work to find this girl with the aide of the other professors, and then they found out it was just a dream - how embarrassing and what a waste of time it would be!

Harry decided the best thing to do was to put the dream aside for now. If he had another vision or dream or saw something that reminded him of it, he would think on it then. For now, he wanted to go back to sleep - it was still too early to be awake.

But that nagging voice in the back of his head kept him awake - the voice, it pointed out. And Harry thought on it - the voice HAD seemed familiar but the phrasing had been strange. "Greater good"? What did that mean? Sighing and rolling over, he decided that come morning he would send two letters - one to Hermione and one to Siris and in each he would ask subtle if they knew what "the greater good" meant or who had said it.

He had this nagging feeling that this summer was going to be full of surprises.


End file.
